Name: Poker
Creator: 10th Century Chinese Emperor created a game which led to this (according to historians)
Platform: In person with friends. Can be played digitally too or online
Target Audience: As long as someone understands playing cards, they can play it. (5+ I guess?)
“How might this game put people at risk for addiction? How does it compare to other games that use chance or probability? How does this game engage with aspects of probability, and how is randomness feeding into addiction?“
Reasons for addiction?
The primary reason the game is fun is because of the sense of fellowship that the player feels due to the communication that the player does with other players using the bets. For example, a call communicates that I am willing to fight you, a fold says that I surrender and a raise suggests that I beat you. Since no player likes getting beat (call it ego if you want to), if a player ends up losing a round, the player feels desperate to take revenge and get it the next time. Hence, the addiction is primarily due to the feeling of making it back into the game. Since there is always a false hope, that you can buy back in and make it all back.
Another source of addiction is winning streaks. If a player gets lucky with a lot of hands, then the player feels like playing and starts making mistakes in the process. While the player might have made a lot of money in the beginning, the winning streaks cause an illusion that the player is invincible and it takes one bad move to lose all the earnings. The bad move is difficult to resist unless the player has suffered from such losses before and has learnt to take control in such situations.
A third source of addiction is bullying – when other players let you bully them and you keep bluffing and winning hands. While for the first few hands stranger (but rational) players would let you bully them, they will soon start challenging your bluffs. So, this creates a false sense of dominance which addicts you to keep playing the game, only until you lose it all and feel like buying back in due to the first principle discussed above.
Comparison with other games?
This game is a good combination of chance, strategy and communication. There are games of chance where there is no strategy involved and its purely based on luck and probability – for example, the slot machine, heads or tails, roulette, etc. The purpose of these games is to just have a good / chill time and players are willing to lose some money for the sake of being entertained. I guess slot machines is an exception, because players lose a lot of money and time playing with them.
There are games where chance and strategy are involved – for example blackjack. However, in such games there is no communication happening. The thing that makes Poker different is that the player is not only coming up with a betting strategy to maximize their profit, but also to send signals to other players. For example, bluffing is possible in Poker precisely due to this reason. A player can fake a hand by betting accordingly and confuse the other players at the table leading to winning the hand purely due to communication. This is not possible in Blackjack for example.
Randomness in the game?
Since the deck is shuffled before dealing the cards, there is randomness in the game. Also, since the cards are face down and only a select few cards can be seen by each player, players do not have all the information to make decisions.
How does this randomness lead to addiction?
Well, some players tend to be optimistic – for example, a player might have a straight draw and feel good about hitting it, thereby calling bets from other players. This is related to the video that we saw in class where the speaker discussed how players perceive their chances of winning differently as compared to the mathematical probability. While the probability itself might be quite low, the feeling drives the decision. And when the decision leads to earnings the player feels great about it and continues playing like that until the player loses (which happens soon). On the other hand, if the player loses it, the player feels frustrated and wants to win back the lost money. Either by continuing to play even more aggressively (if the player gets tilted) or more conservatively (if the player is smart and strong).
As discussed in the reading for slot machines, the losses due to near misses hurt, and player feels like they will hit it the next time and keeps waiting for the next time, only to realize its a negative EV (expected value) strategy.
